Amazon Kindle, UK

Monday, 5 March 2012

March 5th in Queer History

Events this day in Queer History

Born this day

Mary Garrett (1854 – 1915) US
Suffragette, who helped found the Bryn Mawr College for women. She also endowed the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine and secured the rights of women to attend thus making it the first co-educational, graduate-level medical school in the United States. At her death, she gave $15,000,000 to M. Carey Thomas, the president of Bryn Mawr College, with whom she was romantically involved and had been living together with at the time

Josephine Herbst(1892 1969) US
Writer and journalist with pronounced socialist or communist leanings, active from 1923 to near the time of her death. In life, she tried to hide her sexuality, but Elinor Langer's biography of Herbst, candidly describes her lesbian relationships with the radical muralist Marion Greenwood and other women.

Pier Paolo Pasolini(1922 – 1975) Italian
A mu;ti-talented film director, poet, writer, and intellectual, Pasolini demonstrated a unique and extraordinary cultural versatility, becoming a highly controversial figure in the process.
While openly gay from the very start of his career, Pasolini rarely dealt with homosexuality in his movies. In 1963 he met "the great love of his life," fifteen-year-old Ninetto Davoli whom he later cast in his 1966 film Uccellacci e uccellini. Even though their sexual relations lasted only a few years, Ninetto continued to live with Pasolini and was his constant companion.

In 1975, Pasolini was murdered by being run over several times with his own car on the beach at Ostia.

Jack Cassidy(1927 – 1976) US
Stage, film and screen actor. Cassidy was married twice, but his son David wrote about his father's bisexuality in his autobiography, a fact he discovered only after his father's death.

Michael Rumaker (1932 – ) US
Author, most of whose fiction concerns his life as a gay man, beginning withthe volumes A Day and a Night at the Baths (1979) and My First Satyrnalia (1981).

Laurie Toby Edison (1942 – ) US
Internationally exhibited portrait photographer. Her three suites of photographs include a series of nudes of fat women, a series of nudes of a very diverse cross-section of men, and a series of clothed portraits of women living in Japan.

Geert Dales (1952 – ) Dutch
Politician, who entered local politics after a career as a civil service. He served on the Amsterdam city council from to , and as deputy mayor from , and as mayor of Leeuwarden from . During his term of office, he became prominent in public debates on same - sex marriage. Having taken advantage of the law himself, he expressed opposition to marriage officials who, as a matter of principle, did not wish to conduct them.

Thomas Hermanns (1963 – ) German
TV-presenter, director, TV-author and comedian. He is known for his comedy-show Quatsch Comedy Club.
Hermanns has been in a relationship for 14 years with Wolfgang Macht, whom he married in 2008.

Matt Lucas (1974 – ) UK
English comedian, screenwriter and actor best known for his acclaimed work with David Walliams in the television show Little Britain. In May 2007, he was placed eighth in the list of the UK's 100 most influential gay men and women, by British newspaper The Independent.

Died this day

Richmond Barthe (1901 - 1989) US
African American sculptor,closely associated with the Harlem Rennaissance. He is known for his many public works, including the Toussaint L’Ouverture Monument in Port-au-Prince, Haiti and a sculpture of Rose McClendon for Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater House.
Throughout his career, many of his patrons and subjects were other gay men, and the exploration of both race and eroticism were central to his work.